Scientific publishers such as the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and Taylor & Francis have begun attempting to detect fraud in academic paper submissions with an AI image-checking program called Proofig, reports The Register. Proofig, a product of an Israeli firm of the same name, aims to help use "artificial intelligence, computer vision and image processing to review image integrity in scientific publications," according to the company's website. During a trial that ran from January 2021 to May 2022, AACR used Proofig to screen 1,367 papers accepted for publication, according to The Register. Of those, 208 papers required author contact to clear up issues such as mistaken duplications, and four papers were withdrawn. In particular, many journals need help detecting image duplication fraud in Western blots, which are a specific style of protein-detection imagery consisting of line segments of various widths.

Analysis Shady scientists trying to publish bad research may want to think twice as academic publishers are increasingly using AI software to automatically spot signs of data tampering. Duplications of images, where the same picture of a cluster of cells, for example, is copied, flipped, rotated, shifted, or cropped is, unfortunately, quite common. In cases where the errors aren't accidental, the doctored images are created to look as if the researchers have more data and conducted more experiments then they really did. Image duplication was the top reason papers were retracted for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) over 2016 to 2020, according to Daniel Evanko, the company's Director of Journal Operations and Systems. Having to retract a paper damages the authors and the publishers' reputation.

If you have ever proofread an article for a friend or read research papers for work, you would know the concentration and hard work that goes into ensuring a given written work is original. And if plagiarism checks weren't enough, we now have deepfakes, allowing authors to fabricate images. Doubled edged sword, the same AI allowing the creation of such deepfakes, is now stepping in to help organisations spot duplication. The year 2021 has witnessed publications like the AACR, Wiley, and Frontiers, leveraging AI on their peer-reviewed manuscripts to identify duplicated images and alert the editors automatically. The softwares can tag images that have been doctored, rotated, flipped, filtered and stretched.

AI software that spots duplicated images in research papers can work faster and on a larger scale than manual checkers -- but still needs editorial oversight.Credit: Laurence Dutton/Getty Just before a study appears in any of ten journals published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), it undergoes an unusual extra check. Since January 2021, the AACR has been using artificial intelligence (AI) software on all manuscripts it has provisionally accepted after peer review. The aim is to automatically alert editors to duplicated images, including those in which parts have been rotated, filtered, flipped or stretched. The AACR is an early adopter in what could become a trend. Hoping to avoid publishing papers with images that have been doctored -- whether because of outright fraud or inappropriate attempts to beautify findings -- many journals have hired people to manually scan submitted manuscripts for issues, often using software to help check what they find. But Nature has learnt that in the past year, at least four publishers have started automating the process by relying on AI software to spot duplications and partial duplications before manuscripts are published.